3. Barriers & Drivers

The working group’s task was to identify the existing drivers and barriers to the introduction of electric buses in specific regions. The following definitions were agreed:

A driver is an element (such as a policy or an action) that can help transit agencies and governments initiate, continue, or expand their e-bus fleet.

A Barrier is an obstacle or circumstance that can prevent transit agencies and/or governments from initiating, continuing, or expanding their fleet of e-buses.

The initial work concentrated on two draft spreadsheets: the Status Quo report draft that the Dutch partners prepared and similar reports drawn by the other partners, and from other sources such as technical reports, project publications, articles etc.

The structure available in the research document “Barriers-to-adopting-electric-buses” published by WRIROSSCITIES.org in 2019 was also considered. The common goal was to have a concise structure for the analytical framework for Drivers & Barriers.

The working group observed that, when Barriers are being read positively and not as obstacles, it opened the way to identifying corresponding possible solutions. Solutions can be reported also in the form of experiences being documented by each project partner called Good practices (see section 4 hereunder).

The second step was to link up the spreadsheet with the more compact matrix indicated in WRIROSSCITIES.org Report (see Fig. 1 and Appendix 2). The project held an online workshop on the said theme in April 2020. The working group presented to the participants the initial results of the analytical work and carried out an online survey to evaluate the Drivers & Barriers relevance.

As a result, the TWG prepared the final version of the Drivers & Barriers spreadsheet, including results of the survey scoring and the suggested additional Drivers & Barriers by the Workshop participants during the online survey. This version of the spreadsheet is shown in Fig. 1.